“Sun your granny!” responded Francie, walking gingerly across the gravel in her high-heeled house shoes; “I’m as well as ever I was.”
“Well, you don’t look it,” he said with a concerned glance at the faint colour in her cheeks and the violet shadows under her eyes. “Come and sit down in the shade; it’s about all you’re good for.”
A path skirted the flower-beds and bent round the evergreen-covered slope that rose between the house and the road, and at the bend a lime-tree spread its flat, green boughs lavishly over the path, shading a seat made of half-rotten larch poles that extended its dilapidated arms to the passer-by.
“Well now, tell me all about it,” began Lambert as soon as they had sat down. “What did you feel like when you began to remember it all? Were you very angry with me?”
“Yes, of course, I was angry with you, and I am now this minute, and haven’t I a good right, with my new hat at the bottom of the lake?”
“I can tell you we were both pretty nearly at the bottom of the lake along with it,” said Lambert, who disapproved of this frivolous way of treating the affair. “I don’t suppose I ever was nearer death than I was when the sail was on top of me.”
Francie looked at him for one instant with awe-struck eyes, and Lambert was congratulating himself on having made her realise the seriousness of the situation, when she suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh!” she apologised, “the thought just came into my head of the look of Mrs. Lambert in a widow’s cap, and how she’d adore to wear one! You know she would, now don’t you?”
“And I suppose you’d adore to see her in one?”
“Of course I would!” She gave him a look that was equivalent to the wag of the tail with which a dog assures the obtuse human being that its worrying and growling are only play. “You might know that without being told. And now perhaps you’ll tell me how poor Mrs. Lambert is? I hear she was greatly upset by the fright she got about you, and indeed you’re not worthy of it.”